Eugène Carrière

MATERNITÉ (grande planche)

1899

Eugène Anatole Carrière (16 January 1849 – 27 March 1906) was a French Symbolist artist of the fin-de-siècle period. Carrière's paintings are best known for their near-monochrome brown palette and their ethereal, dreamlike quality. He was a close friend of Auguste Rodin and his work likely influenced Pablo Picasso's Blue Period. He was also associated with such writers as Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Morice. Carrière had great admiration for many of the Old Masters, but in his early work he was mainly influenced by his contemporary Jean-Jacques Henner. He increasingly used a near monochrome brown palette with occasional touches of other colours and a painterly technique somewhat like that of Henner, and by the mid-1880s his work was characterized by a dense, misty brown atmosphere out of which the images emerged. The Sick Child (1885; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) is an example of the theme of a mother and her child that Carrière often used and that has come to be regarded as typifying his work. Carrière occupies an important place in fin-de-siècle Symbolism, which developed in the visual arts from the mid-1880s. The quality of poetic, dreamlike reverie that pervades his work particularly appealed to Symbolist critics such as Charles Morice and Jean Dolent; the latter described Carrière’s art as reality having the magic of dreams. Carrière also frequented the Café Voltaire and was involved in Symbolist theatre, bringing him into the mainstream of Symbolism. By employing a subdued palette, softening the focus and enveloping his figures in a thick, dark atmosphere, as in Maternity (c. 1889; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), Carrière achieved a rarified sense of space, light and colour. His ethereal images have a quality of pervasive stillness. Carrière’s strong belief in the essential brotherhood of Man led him to consider his family as a microcosm of mankind. Though most of his paintings are of family members or family relationships, his interest in the universal rather than the specific usually resulted in figures without much individuality presented in a formless environment. He also produced a number of portraits, with notable examples being that of the poet Paul Verlaine (1890; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) and the sculptor Louis-Henri Devillez (1887). Several of his works can be found at the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Rodin in Paris, the Tate in London and the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade.